PRINCETON — The parking officials in the recent Princeton meter scandal may face criminal charges from the county level.

Business Administrator Bob Bruschi addressed the Princeton Town Council Monday night about the facts concerning the parking scandal.

What started as an internal investigation about some phone calls the township had received back in July didn’t gain traction until published reports called attention to the scam, Bruschi said.

“From that point we launched a full scale internal investigation which resulted in one of our officers being terminated. We demoted another officer and put him back to work in our parking garage as well as a four week unpaid suspension. There was only the one that appeared to have anything gotten in return for his overlooking, whether it was un-enforcement, exchanging goods, or preferential treatment to customers,” Bruschi said.

Bruschi alluded to the fact that parking officials had allowed certain merchants and stores to place their menus or coasters on car dashboards in order to forego getting ticketed in two-hour parking zones.

“We were not able to recover anything on the second individual other than that he failed to handle a particular summons that was issued in our town that actually helped tie the whole matter together for us. That summons he processed but didn’t follow normal procedure was what he was suspended on,” the business administrator said.

Bruschi said that in terms of criminal charges, all information and reports have been sent to the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office. He said they had not heard back from the county and could not comment on information in the report because it is potential criminal matter.

Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller said she didn’t understand why criminal charges haven’t been brought because it was clearly illegal.

“All the information goes to county prosecutor’s office prior to our initiating anything, we felt it was best to be handled by third party,” Bruschi said.

Casey DeBlasio, Public Information Officer for the prosecutor’s office, said they will be meeting with Princeton officials and law enforcement representatives next week to discuss Princeton’s investigation into the parking issue and why that investigation has not resulted in criminal charges being filed by the town.

The business administrator said that they are not looking at hiring personnel until they find a system to put in place that will make it difficult for something like this to happen again. Currently, a Princeton Police Officer has picked up extra hours and is patrolling parking.

“Since this has occurred we have taken significant time to speak to those people, especially those that represent us in the field, to make sure that they’re aware of what our policies are, it shouldn’t be looked at doing, it is career ending,” Bruschi said.

The businesses involved are also going to be getting periodic check-ins. Bruschi said they went to the businesses not to investigate them, but to ask for their help in figuring out the scam.

Councilwoman Jo Butler asked if there was any estimate of lost revenue due to the meters not running.

“We would have no idea how we would even look at that, and the revenue we would lose would be ticketed revenue not the meter revenue. There is no way of knowing how many people or meters were not ticketed or paid,” Bruschi said.

Butler also asked if there was a sense of how many merchants were involved, and the business administrator told her more than one was all he could say.

“The case where we were able to get enough information to terminate the parking employee came from the manager at one of the restaurants,” Bruschi said.

Councilwoman Heather Howard asked if the terminated employee’s pension would be taken away. Bruschi said that until charges are brought at county level, no actions could be taken against his pension.